“Necrosha”

(X-Necrosha one-shot, X-Force #21-25)
Writers: Craig Kyle & Christopher Yost
Artist: Clayton Crain
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editors: Jeanine Schaefer & Nick Lowe

Thanks to the knock-on effects of the volcano, there are no new comics in Britain this week, which in turn means no X-Axis.  So instead, I’ll take a look at the last X-Force storyline, “Necrosha.”  Technically this is a crossover with X-Men Legacy and New Mutants.  But in practice, the story is contained in X-Force.  The other two titles simply did their own stories in the margins, taking advantage of the opportunity to use dead characters for a couple of issues.

First time around, I wasn’t a fan of this.  As often happens, reading it again in one sitting does at least make it a little clearer what the creators were going for.  This is a story with a lot of clutter, and the main threads come through more clearly without a month-long gap between chapters.  But it remains a clunky story that doesn’t really hold together – albeit one which is at least trying to pay off a number of long-running storylines.

The basic idea goes like this.  As we established quite some time ago, back in ancient Rome, Selene had a stab at sacrificing everyone in the city to turn herself into a goddess.  It all went wrong because her lackey Eliphas made a hash of things.  Eliphas is now trying to get back in her good books by offering to provide her with a zombie army raised from the dead with the Transmode virus.  Selene’s big idea is to use the virus to revive the slaughtered population of Genosha, and then sacrifice them to turn herself into a goddess.

Running alongside that, the writers get to throw in cameos by a ton of dead characters; subplots about Elixir and Wolfsbane are wrapped up; and Selene’s zombie army invades the X-Men’s island.

So, fine.  It’s all ridiculously melodramatic, but hell, it’s comics.  Selene’s going to raise the dead and use them to gain ultimate power or something.  But in an attempt to wring six issues out of it, it’s become incredibly complicated, littered with unnecessary characters, and plagued by plot holes.

The final two issues have major logic problems.  Issue #24 sees X-Force launch a completely unnecessary frontal assault on a castle, charging through an army of the undead, instead of just asking the Vanisher to teleport them straight into the building.  Vanisher teleports them in at the start of the scene; he teleports himself into the castle later on.  The plot requires him to be separated from the group; but the story brings that about by having everyone’s IQ drop to single figures for two pages.

Issue #25 sees Selene defeated.  I honestly don’t understand how.  Something about a mystic ritual never mentioned before that issue, but beyond that, I’m lost.  It’s obviously supposed to be some sort of pay off for the violation of James’ tribe, but there’s no proper set-up, so it doesn’t work.

And what about the early issues, where Selene’s zombies attack the X-Men’s island?  Granted, Selene has a reason to attack the island.  She needs to recover the magic knife that Eli Bard lost to Warpath in a previous issue, because apparently it’s essential to her ritual.  But she only discovers that she’s missing a macguffin in chapter three, by which point the invasion is well underway.  So why did she order the invasion in the first place?  The dialogue seems to suggest that she just wants revenge on Emma Frost and Sebastian Shaw, but that’s a ridiculously flimsy motivation – can’t she wait until after she’s become a goddess in twelve hours time? – and the story does nothing with it anyway.

The story also suffers from a bloated cast.  The horde of zombie cameos is forgiveable, because it’s kind of the gimmick, but it also creates a smokescreen that obscures the important parts of the plot.  A bigger problem is Selene’s inner circle, some of whom seem to have been selected using the Official Handbook, a blindfold and a pin.  Yes, we need Eliphas, because he’s essential to the plot.  And we need Wither because he was already linked to Selene in an earlier story, though he’s written here as a disappointingly one-dimensional villain.

Blink?  Well, the plot requires some teleporting, though Selene’s a sorceress and could do that for herself.  But the other two?  This group seem to have been assembled so that X-Force have a rival team to fight halfway through the storyline – but once you’ve spent three issues fighting zombies of characters people have actually heard of, it’s hardly raising the stakes to bring on nonentities like 90s henchman Senyaka, or Dazzler’s staggeringly obscure sister Mortis, last seen in 1984.  (Dazzler doesn’t even have a major role in the plot.)  Wouldn’t this have been a simpler and stronger story with just Selene, Eliphas, Wither and the zombies?

So: the plot’s a mess.  Nor does it really end up being about anything in particular.  Selene is not what you’d call a rounded character at the best of times.  The emotional core of this story is apparently supposed to lie in Eliphas trying to get back in her favour, which never reaches a satisfying resolution, and James being tormented by the return of his brother, which is almost pushed to the sidelines.  (The fact that the zombie horde includes James’ entire tribe only gets a passing mention in the whole arc.)  A subplot with Wolfsbane’s boyfriend sacrificing himself to Hela in order to save her does carry a bit of emotional weight, but it’s a subplot.

As for the art… well, it’s a Clayton Crain story.  He pulls off some nice effects on the transmode-infected characters, with little lines of brightly coloured circuitry standing out against his generally dark images.  There are some moody establishing shots of Genosha which work well, though quite when the city got remodelled in gothic style, I have no clue. And sometimes, when he’s forced to work with brightly coloured characters hitting one another, there’s real energy to his layouts.

But it’s not great.  His characters don’t do emotion very well, though it has to be said that the plot doesn’t exactly give him much to work with.  The whole thing is murky and frequently hard to follow.  Backgrounds seem to be a foreign concept to him.  I realise that he’s going for mood, but for the most part his interiors don’t seem oppressive or claustrophobic – just undefined and vacant.  Still, there are moments in these issues that do impress.  It’s just that they’re usually the moments where the art breaks from a general air of monotonous gloom and does something interesting with colour.  Much of the rest of the time, it comes across as a comic which has just painted its bedroom black.

This is a disappointing comic, because all involved have done far better in the past, and no doubt will do so again.  Nonetheless, the bottom line is that it’s a weak concept, and a clumsily constructed plot, rendered predominantly in assorted shades of murk.  One for completists only.

“Nation X”

Writer: Matt Fraction
Pencillers: Greg Land, Terry Dodson, Whilce Portacio and Phil Jimenez
Inkers: Jay Leisten, Rachel Dodson, Ed Tadeo and Andy Lanning
Colourists: Justin Ponsor and Soto
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Editor: Nick Lowe

Goodness, it’s been a while since I’ve done one of these.  But then, “Nation X” has been running for six months.  And besides, I’m not getting this week’s comics until Monday, so let’s start on the backlog.

Despite the “Nation X” logo on the cover, this isn’t really a single storyline so much as a bunch of stuff that came out between the “Utopia” and “Second Coming” crossovers.  There are several different strands here.  They don’t entirely add up to a coherent whole, but then they weren’t necessarily meant to.  View it as seven issues of an ongoing title rather than as a single storyline, and it makes rather more sense.  In that context, it’s interesting to note that the “Nation X” hardcover, scheduled for May, features not just these seven issues, but also the Dark Reign – The List one-shot and the entire Nation X anthology.

“Utopia” ended with the X-Men retreating from San Francisco to live on their own little artificial island in the bay, something which was presented as something of a victory over the corrupt officialdom of Norman Osborn.  It seemed a rather strange thing to do, when the X-books had only just relocated to San Francisco with such fanfare.  Marvel’s wider publishing schedule may play a part here.  We’re told (though the book never finds space to actually show it) that the team are still popular with the people of San Francisco, and there’s nothing really to stop them from moving back… except Osborn.  But his story ends with Siege, so if they’re going to do this story, there’s a fairly narrow window of opportunity.  What happens next is anyone’s guess; logically, there’s nothing to stop the X-Men simply moving back to the mainland in a couple of months time.  This is a problem with the whole set-up; Fraction seems to want us to see Utopia as a permanent move, but the plot’s driven by something that we all know is purely transitory.

Rather more interesting, and more successful, is the general uncertainty and ambivalence about the island.  Scott clearly wants it to be some sort of mutant homeland and source of pride.  As a haven for virtually all the surviving mutants, it’s at least managed to unite them all in a single group and put an end to the usual inter-mutant squabbling (though again, this is really just asserted as a fact, since Fraction doesn’t find time to show us the low-rent villains and bit part characters supposedly wandering around the island).  Other characters see it as last-ditch retreat by a team who are increasingly backed into a corner.  And Hank, channeling the feelings of long-time readers, spends the first few issues wondering why on earth he’s still bothering, before throwing up his hands in despair and walking out at the end of issue #519; for him, this just doesn’t resemble the X-Men any more.  Of course, Fraction might just be writing him out so that he can be used in the Avengers titles, but it’s a smart move to use him as a mouthpiece to acknowledge all the problems with this direction.  Scott’s pride in the island hovers somewhere between making a virtue of necessity, and outright denial.  That’s a promising angle; is he suppressing things that are just too depressing to think about, or is he simply losing the plot?

Fraction also makes good use of Magneto, who shows up apparently to lend his support, and who naturally spends the next few issues trying to persuade people that he doesn’t have an ulterior motive.  He probably does – he’s Magneto, after all – but his attempts to get the X-Men to trust him are well written.

On the other hand, the idea of the island as a “nation” never really comes across.  It’s basically the X-Men running a facility and offering free board to any passing mutants – and that’s essentially what we had a couple of years ago when there was a refugee camp in the X-Men’s garden.  This is presumably meant to feel different, but it doesn’t.  And the main plot for these issues is a bit weak too.  It involves a bunch of new villains attacking the island with Predator X’s, apparently as a cover to infiltrate the island with nanotech so that they can catalogue all the remaining mutants.  This eventually builds to the revelation that they’re in league with John Sublime.  But it doesn’t really go anywhere in the course of these issues, and the bad guys are not well established as characters.  A couple of them have nice one-liner powers (a kung-fu speedster is a fun idea) but they have no personality and the designs are uninspired.

There are also some gratingly awful plot problems in there.  Issue #517 can’t make up its mind about how hard it is to beat a Predator X – Magneto is wiped out by fighting one, yet some random Atlantean can beat one singlehandedly by chucking a spear at it.  That’s inconsistent.  Then, a few issues later, this same depowered Magneto is supposed to be powerful enough to pluck a spaceship from light years away and turn it back round.  That’s stupid.  Issue #520 wants to tell us that Wolverine’s sense of smell is so acute that he can sense Fantomex in the sewers while he’s standing on the roof of a skyscraper.  That’s ridiculous.  That said, these problems become less prominent when you read the thing in one go, because they tend to be matters of detail rather than going to the heart of Fraction’s story.  But they’re still bad.

Spliced into the middle of all this, issues #518 and #519 are a seemingly unrelated two-parter about Scott, Emma and the Void.  “Utopia” ended with Emma getting contaminated by a sliver of the Void, the evil alter ego of the Sentry, in a scene that came completely out of the blue.  These issues get rid of that plot almost immediately, in a way that almost makes you wonder why they bothered doing it at all.  The upshot is to transfer the Void to Scott’s mind, and then have him contain it with his staggering powers of repression.  Now, that’s a great idea, and I do like the concept of Scott having superhuman levels of worryingly misdirected willpower.  And perhaps it’s not a complete detour; Fraction’s take on Cyclops is a character who has the responsibility of leading but has no real plan.  He’s just clinging on and hoping for something to turn up.  He is, in short, on the way to a nervous breakdown.  Saddling him with the Void might pay off down the line, then.

And while these issues seem unrelated to the surrounding story, they’re still the best ones.  Partly, that’s because they have the benefit of art from Terry and Rachel Dodson, who have the visual inventiveness to pull off great sequences in the astral plane, and to make the Void a striking jet-black visual.  Their pages have all sorts of eccentric panel layouts without losing clarity.  It’s good stuff.

The rest – well, aside from issue #522, which is a fill-in by Whilce Portacio – is drawn by Greg Land.  Now, in fairness, it’s getting better.  There’s a bit more atmosphere in the inking, and less sense of airbrushing.  Some of his action scenes are quite striking, and he does good establishing shots.  But his women are terrible – interchangeable and inexpressive.  His acting’s not great generally, to be honest, and his pages are still littered with awkward, slightly odd facial expressions.  There’s too much manic grinning.  Still, there are also moments where he gets it right, and we’re moving in the right direction here.

It’s a very mixed set of stories.  There are good ideas in here, but too much of the “Nation X” set-up is left to assertion instead of being properly explained.  The main villains are weak.  The art’s patchy.  And the Void two-parter comes across as a story being aborted prematurely.  But the Dodson issues look great, Fraction does have some strong ideas for Scott’s character, and the idea of Nation X as described (even if we don’t actually see it on panel) is a decent last-stand concept, something which makes sense if this is meant to be the mutants being backed into a corner before Hope shows up to save the day in “Second Coming.”

But having good ideas isn’t enough; you need to get them across.  Even at their best, these issues all too often feel like Fraction is telling us about the story, instead of actually telling it.  There’s a stronger idea in here somewhere, but it isn’t coming through properly.

“Passage to India”

Writer: Chris Claremont
Artist: Jonboy Meyers
Letterer: Ed Dukeshire
Colourist: Jim Caralampidis
Editor: Jordan White

Since I get my comics by mail order, and since the Royal Mail doesn’t deliver on public holidays, I won’t be getting this week’s books until Monday at the earliest.  So instead, let’s make a start on my backlog of completed storylines.  And this one really is backlogged – the collected edition came out a couple of weeks ago.

GeNext United was Chris Claremont’s second GeNext miniseries, but in his mind it’s clearly issues #6-10 of a GeNext ongoing series, complete with slow-burning subplots.  The first series didn’t sell particularly well, but evidently did enough to justify a sequel – and it actually wasn’t bad, with likeable central characters.  The second series ended up at around the 10K mark on ICV2’s estimates, and despite evident good intentions, it doesn’t really work.  I suspect this will probably be it for GeNext.

On paper, the premise is outlandishly complicated.  This series is supposed to be about the next generation of X-Men in a world where the Marvel Universe advanced in real time.  On top of that, Claremont clearly views it as a sequel to X-Men: The End, which itself already took place in an alternate timeline.  Fortunately, most of these convolutions can be ignored happily enough; for practical purposes, it’s enough to know that this is a series about the X-Men’s teenage kids in an alternate future where the team have given up being superheroes and are just trying to run a school.  And part of the tension is about whether the kids should follow in their parents’ footsteps, or just learn from their mistakes and try to live a quiet life.  Now, obviously, we all know what the answer is, because it wouldn’t be much of a series if it consisted entirely of them studying for exams, but what matters is how you get there.

So far, so good… but then we get to this story.  Loosely, it keeps up the central theme by giving the kids another adventure and letting them angst again about whether they want to do this for a living.  But mainly, it’s about taking them to India and bringing on the local heroes and villains, including a goddess who’s into mind control (because heaven knows Claremont has yet to fully explore the thrilling possibilities of this underused plot device).  That aside, though, there’s nothing wrong with the Indian setting; aside from being generally an interesting sort of place, it also has the advantage of keeping the characters away from better-established areas of the Marvel Universe. 

The problems come when the story tries to make some sort of grand point about the diversity of India, and never really manages to connect it to either the characters or the plot.  The second half feels horrendously rushed, as an entire plot about the team being turned into typical Indian citizens and leading normal Indian lives is set up and then resolved in less than an issue.  Then everyone has to race back to fight the villain, who gets beaten not so much because of anything that happened along the way, but more because it’s time for the story to end.  And everyone gets turned back to normal, except for No-Name, who stays Indian for no apparent reason, presumably with a view to furthering a subplot about her ambivolence towards her as-yet-mysterious background.

There are other clumsy aspects.  Gambit and his daughter show up out of nowhere in issue #4 to reunite the team, with no explanation of how they actually found them in the first place (particularly odd since they then have to rely on Oli to track the rest of the group himself).  The daughter of Dr Doom is brought into the story for no obvious purpose, again perhaps with a subplot in mind.  Issue #5 opens by announcing, out of the blue, that Kalima has enchanted an entire city, and then does nothing with the idea.  And the story can’t seem to make up its mind whether it’s being narrated by the Beast or by Claremont’s usual authorial voice (or how the Beast knows some of the things he’s supposed to be narrating).

Then there’s the art.  The first miniseries was drawn by Patrick Scherberger, who was rather good; this one is by Jonboy Meyers, who leaves a lot to be desired.  His characters do a lot of awkward posing, and struggle to convey emotion.  And for the most part, everyone looks alike.  This becomes particularly noticeable when the GeNext characters are supposed to be turned into Indians, so that you can no longer rely on hair colour and skin tone to tell them apart.  The women, in particular, are all but indistinguishable. 

It’s a choppy and unsatisfying read, with some half-formed themes that never quite get anywhere, and art that isn’t ready for prime time.  Since the first GeNext miniseries was promising, I had some hopes for this, but I’m afraid it doesn’t work.